To celebrate the recent 140th birthday of New York's most magnificent museum, we selected some of our favorite food-related pieces in the Met's collection -- which is online in its entirety, so there goes your afternoon -- and paired them, naturally, with something to eat.

Here today; gone tomorrow. Summer subsides all too soon, it seems -- taking with it this year, a number of notable exhibits on temporary view in New York City. Interrupt your summer strolls to catch these shows due to be dismantled once the season changes.

The Museum and Library of The Hispanic Society of America is perhaps the least known of New York City museums, yet it has an extraordinary collection. I recently spent a delightful afternoon at the museum, which reflects the vision of Archer Milton Huntington to establish an institution dedicated to the celebration of Hispanic culture.

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Peck has three areas that she is in charge of: She is the American textile curator and oversees all textiles from the earliest period of American history to the first half of the twentieth century. She makes sure that the textiles are cared for, acquires relevant pieces for the Met, and she designs exhibitions around the textiles in the collection.

Recent catastrophes like the lockouts in Minnesota and Atlanta at least brought to the fore questions about how to fund these organizations, what can be cut and what can't be cut, what one community can manage (rather than a cookie-cutter approach), what a community needs and thus will stretch for.

Some part of me wants to tell people to stuff their phones in their pockets and stand in front of an incredible piece of art and just be. Breathe and feel what the art brings forth in you. All of the emotions are not comfortable, but they're important to feel. Or at least I think so.

It is important to have that daily pause -- to meditate and tune out -- turning inward for insights and centering. However an extended period of Re-NEW-all -- disconnecting to re-connect in a more meaningful manner -- revitalizes one, body and soul.

Luxury is bound up with notions of leadership, innovation and justice. Luxury can inspire both desire and disgust. One of the most emotional of industries, luxury is an important subject, both for luxury brands and the society that variously reveres or rejects them.

After 18 years of lobbying to create a national women's history museum in our nation's capital, Congress has approved the formation of a privately funded, bi-partisan commission to study and produce a plan for the Museum.

I learned in it what I could from Lehmann, and from Ingres too, and from maybe-Marietta, and from Leah; the eye of each of us stares back from the painting, although only mine and Leah's are living now.

If you can't devote the next 30 years of your life to running the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but you do have a hunger to learn more about artists and works of art with which you may never have come in contact before, then you might want to read this book.

The Cloisters is the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art given over to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. With a collection of over 2,000 medieval pieces, the museum's structure is itself part of the exhibit.